This effort hails back to Sergey Brin’s announcement last year that Google was getting too confusing, and would shift its focus back to features and away from products. From the LA Times (via Battelle):

Top executives said Thursday [10/5/06] that they had begun telling engineers to stop launching so many new services and instead focus on making existing ones work together better.

Playing around with this, early results look impressive. This clearly raises the bar for Y and M. And I’m sure the SEO world is already hard at work scheming new ways get on the page via Universal…